I haven't posted about this much in my LJ, but I am currently riding my bike across the country with a group called Ride For World Health (www.rideforworldhealth.org).

I set up a separate blog on my website at www.laurasbikeadventure.com, and will not be posting much (if at all) on LJ. If you want to hear about my totally awesome ride, go to my website and check out this other blog. There's also info about donating on my website if you'd like to support our global health beneficiaries.

I'm currently in Telluride, CO in the middle of the mountains. It's totally amazing here. After a week and a half of cycling, my legs and hind quarters are in the process of becoming a totally amazing mass of rock-solid steel.

While I was in London (at the suggestion of one of my tour-mates), I totally checked out the Broad Street water pump. This pump was made famous by John Snow, an innovative dude who is one of the godfathers of public health as we know it today. If John Snow is a godfather, then the Broad Street water pump is like an epicenter of the genesis of modern public health interventions.

As it turned out, the water pump was only a few blocks from the Soho hostel where I stayed on my last night in London.



Needless to say, I was majorly psyched to be in the midst of public health history.



This is the John Snow pub, where the original water pump was located:



I actually did cool things too while I was in Europe. I'll try to post about less dorky things when I have the chance.

I just got back home this morning. My trip to Europe was awesome!!!! I met awesome people, learned awesome universal health care things, and saw awesome, beautiful and really old things!

I have lots of pics (and mean lots) that I will upload soon. First, I must take a nap. I had The Worst Layover in the World in Boston last night from 9pm until 5am this morning, which means I am super tired. Updates to come.

Oh, and I was in the Miami Herald! They wrote an article about my bike ride. I'll have to post that article too. So much excitement!

In a few hours, I'm leaving to on a flight to go to London for what will be my first trip to Europe, ever! In fact, aside from a trip to the Canadian Rockies a few years ago, this will be one of my first times ever being outside of the US.

First stop is Edinburgh, where I will meet up with my friend psycholibrarian and check out castles and winding narrow town roads. Then I check out London, Munich and Dublin for this bad ass trip to check out the national health care systems in their respective countries. I am armed with a camera and will post mad blogs about the trip (if not when I'm over there, then when I get back).

I am so looking forward to my bike ride! I leave for Las Vegas on April 7th and have a ticket to take me from Washington DC back to Miami on May 23rd. Somehow, in between those two dates, I will find some way to cycle my ass from point A to point B. I am in the process of getting a camera so I can document and share the entire ride. Stay tuned!

Once I get the camera, I will take some pictures of the Everglades, where I have been training. In the past two weeks, I have fallen off my bike twice. For those of you not familiar with cycling, I have these special "clipless pedals" that allow my shoes to snap into the pedals, kind of like how ski boots snap onto skis. Since your shoes are basically attached to the pedals, it's pretty easy to fall if you have to break quickly and are not yet used to snapping your feet back out of the pedals. I am not yet used to this. One of the falls was so bad and so painful that I thought I might have broken my leg. The other caused me to get a bunch of splinters in hands and arms.

During both falls, I was terrified that I might have fallen on to, or next to, an alligator. Thankfully, I was no where near one (and there are always lots of them around). This is the weirdness of cycling in the Everglades.

I'm waiting for a couple acceptance (or non-acceptance!) letters from schools this week. Two schools that I am particularly excited about. I feel like a little kid every day rushing home from work to check the mail. The info I receive in the mail this week may determine what I do with the next four years of my life! I feel like I'm going to burst.

This whole process of applying to schools has been so exciting. It's also been extremely rewarding in light of how much I busted my ass to get to where I am today. I'm keeping my fingers and my legs crossed until I hear any news!

I had a really touching interaction the other day with one of the busboys at work (the same one who offered to get me $150 grills).

I was at one of the sidestations getting soda for my table when I announced to all my co-workers present that I had to fart. I got reactions of mostly "ewww" and "awesome," however Prince (my $150 grillz friend) turned to me:

"You said WHAT?"

"I said I had to fart. But don't worry, I wouldn't fart on you. I respect you too much for that."

I expected him to thank me, but instead, he said to me, "listen, you can fart on me any time."

I was in shock. "Really?," I asked.

"Yeah! Some girls like to pretend that they don't fart or nothing. Fuck that shit. You can fart any time you want."

"Oh, believe me, I fart all the time!"

That was one of the sweetest interactions I think I've ever had at work. All day long, my head was in the clouds. I kept telling people, "Prince told me I could fart on him!"

It was really special.

I really want to buy a set of grills so I can be totally pimped out, but I don't know where to buy a cheap set. One of the busboys at work told me he could get me a set for real cheap, but they're still $150!! That's not cheap. I said "I want to get some fake ones," and he looked at me like, "why would you want to do that?"

dancingspork suggested I use tin foil, but that's a little too trashy for me.

Why does it seem that all German porn involves poop?

I went to a XXX store yesterday and the "European" section consisted of all German porn. Some of the German porn was explicitly about poop. But even the "lesbian" porn and "incest" porn involved poop, like lesbians making out while smeared with poop.

What gives? I'm sure the rest of Europe is not very happy about this.

I've just been accepted to participate in a cross-country bike trip called Ride for World Health, which I am totally excited about, as riding cross country is something I've been dreaming about for years. We're raising money for two excellent world health funds, which makes the bike ride even more fulfilling, but the only problem I just learned of is that I have to raise the full $2500 by March 1st.

Now, I've never raised funds like this before, and I'm kind of nervous that $2500 is a lot of money to raise in little more than a month. The majority of people I know do not have a lot of money, and I'm not sure I have enough time to organize a sufficient fundraising event. :/

What's a girl to do?

I will become even more awesome than I was during the previous 365 days of my life. I'm on a never-ending upward spiral.

I've just been accepted to my first medical school! Hells yeah! Of the schools I've visited so far, it's not my favorite, but even if I don't hear back from any other schools, I know for sure now that I'm going to be a doctor!!! SWEEEEEEEET. Just don't start calling me Dr. Laura, for the love of god.

I have a final next week. I'm procrastinating. By studying to become a sex guru.

I purchased a domain name and hosting for my first website ever! It's www.rideforthemind.org, for my schizophrenia research fundraiser. Nothing's on it yet, but I plan to learn how to build it and become a bona-fide geek. As of now, I only know the tiniest bit of HTML. I decided to go with Linux hosting because I'm under the impression that it will give me greater geek street cred. I think I may use Joomla! for my "content management," unless someone suggests something better. See, I'm gettin' down with the geek lingo already!!

I had a dream last night that I ate a baby. I woke up feeling pretty upset about the whole thing - not because of the moral implications of eating children, but because I was supposed to be babysitting the infant I ate, and did a poor job of making the mother fail to notice that her baby was missing. I knew I was going to get in trouble for being a bad babysitter and it made me feel icky.

I don't remember a lot of the details from when I was eating the baby, but I don't remember it being particularly unpleasant.

Last week I got my first interview invite to grad school! So this means I will be back in NYC again within the next month or so, probably at the very end of October. Plus, it means that I will have another chance to wear that nice suit I bought, which means I'm a grown-up! Cool.

It just so happens that the town I've been living in here in Virginia is only about half an hour away from the town of Manassas, where the Battles of Bull Run were held. The old battlefields have been turned into a national park, and it's got miles and miles of trails leading through the fields and the forest that cover the surrounding hills. I first went there two weeks ago and have been going back almost every day after work to run on the trails.

The area is really wild and beautiful, which serves as a contrast to the horrific battles that were fought there. I had never been to a historic battlefield before, but standing there, in a field where thousands of men died, it was easy to imagine what it must have been like to be some anonymous soldier facing death in those pastoral fields in the middle of July.

I mean, the way they fought was so crazy! They just lined up with their guns and fired across a field at their opponents, who were also lined up in a row, in the open, with nothing to shield either side from the incoming bullets. It's like marching straight up to a firing squad! I try so hard to imagine what it must have felt like to be a man at the front of that line, facing certain bodily damage or death. I guess this is what it means to have “history come alive” for you.

So I think about the nature of war as I run through the park, surrounded by the amazing beauty of the dense forest and the rolling fields. These ruminations are supplemented by the dorky Civil War books I’ve been reading in my spare time. The history of Civil War medicine is especially interesting. A full two thirds of the men who died in the war died from disease, not battle wounds! Doctors pulled bullets out of wounds with their bare, dirty fingers and and dispensed mercury as a friggin cure-all! It's crazy!

When I’m not pondering the wonders of humanity, I have the additional opportunity to view utter shitloads of wildlife. On my runs through the park, I have seen:

- three bunny rabbits
- two raccoons that were actually wild and were not trying to eat garbage
- a freakin' fox!
- a beaver
- nothing short of assloads of deer

I have never seen so many wild mammals in my life!! It's easy to see tons of alligators in the Everglades, but I've grown tired of reptiles. I want more mammals in my life.

- I went down to Atlanta this weekend for my cousin's wedding. It was a fun, all day affair. In the morning, there was a traditional Catholic wedding in this beautiful little church in downtown Atlanta with stained glass windows and lots of colorful murals decorating the interior. After the Catholic ceremony, the whole party went back to my cousin's house for a traditional Vietnamese ceremony (his wife's family is Vietnamese). It involved the groom's family and wedding party arriving ceremoniously at the bride's house bearing gifts which included, among other things, a whole roast pig. The reception that night was at yet another location and involved a 7-course Vietnamese dinner and tastings of the Hennessey XO line (the bride's family owns a liquor store)! Sweeeet. All in all, it was a good time.

- Getting to Atlanta involved a 10 hour drive, each way, which is something I've decided I'm never going to do again without the company of another person. The drive was quite lovely, though - I went down through the Shenendoah valley and basically hugged the Blue Ridge/ Appalachian mountains the entire way down. I had no idea how beautiful the mountains in that area are! Especially around Roanoke. Now I really want to go down there and go camping while I'm still in the area.

- On my out of Atlanta on Sunday, I stopped at a gas station to get gas before I left the metro area. My credit card was declined. I called to find out why, and it turned out someone tried to charge $1100 to my card at a Wal-Mart. That definitely was not me. The charge was declined, as were a few other charges. This is the first time I've ever been a victim of credit card fraud, and of all people it was committed by some rednecks who tried to go on a shopping spree at Wal-Mart! I feel very violated. Visa had to cancel my account right there on the spot, which really screwed me over because I was expecting to use it to pay for gas on my friggin' 10 hour drive back to VA. Fortunately, I had enough cash, and they send me my new card later this week.

Comic relief from the grinding work of research and grant writing:

So I made it up to the internship in one piece. It's so weird to be back in an office environment. I love the work I'm doing now, but man, just being in a traditional office space is boring. I'm going to the National Library of Medicine later this week, and I'm totally looking forward to it, as it'll be a nice change of pace! The industrial park we're in is surrounded by all these lovely mid-atlantic trees and I keep staring out the window, longing to frolic through the grounds.

At least there's a window nearby to look out of (my last office job was in a basement)!